Harmonic Filtering in Edison

Sometimes, you come across a nice sample and think, “Woo! I’m going to rip out that long, sustained saxophone and free it from this boring-arse ambient relaxation music.” But then you notice all the other trills and runs and bird chirps that occupy the same frequency range. Thankfully, Edison’s equalizer is great.

The EQ in Edison has some options in the dropdown menu accessible from the little arrow next the strange ‘Envelope’ label. There’s a few options for filtering out unharmonic stuff, based on the middle note. The middle note of the sample is set by right-clicking the darker grey ‘Title’ area in Edison, and selecting the middle note down at the bottom of the resulting window. This note will be the root note in a sampler, if the sample is saved and loaded into one. The root note is the note that must be played on the sampler in order for the note to play at normal speed, and when recording instrument multisamples, the note of the sound that was recorded. Edison’s EQ will use the root note to filter out anything that isn’t a harmonic of that note.

The EQ button and root note

Switching to the ‘Spectrum’ view by pressing S, you can probably see pretty clearly where your nice saxophone (or whatever) is. Edison has a lot of options for the spectrum view, one of the more important is that pressing N will switch between normal and ‘natural’ view. All this does is change the scale of the display. In normal mode, the frequencies are scaled linearly across the height of the window, but in ‘natural’ mode they’re scaled with a big fat emphasis on the lower frequencies. This is nice, as the lower frequencies are a lot more important. So, if you’ve identified whatever instrument you want to cut out, remember what it ‘looks like’ and click the EQ button.

A little snippet of a horn of some kind, or something. The arrow is pointing to some obnoxious 16 Khz whine, possibly due to a CRT monitor.

The display inside Edison’s equalizer is different than the main view in Edison. Frequency is on the horizontal while time and level are on the vertical. There is a knob to adjust the scale. Hovering the cursor over top of the fundamental frequency of the sound that you want will display it in FL Studio’s little tooltip area. From here, it’s easy to set the root note of the sample to whatever FL Studio says in the tooltip, bring up the EQ window again and select an unharmonic filtering option from the dropdown arrow.

There seems to be two different pitches going on here, so I might do the whole procedure twice, selecting a different part.

The EQ window displays a neat pattern with all the little points, you click accept, and it might sound good. Mine didn’t sound good whatsoever, so I’m going to try it the labour intensive, manual way. All I’m going to do is copy and paste the whole sample, invert the phase on one of them, EQ out everything I want from it and combine them back together. Everything cancels out except the stuff I want to keep. I suppose I could just silence everything I don’t want in the EQ, but that would take longer, probably. The ‘Hold’ mode of the points in the equalizer are great for this, right click a point and select ‘Hold’. Hopefully, all the new points you make will also be ‘Hold’ points.

Hold

Well, this didn’t work very well for me this time, but that’s okay. Sometimes it works good.

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One Response to “Harmonic Filtering in Edison”

So… I downloaded a Virtual Machine and put Windows XP on it. Can I haz FL…?